Sixteen years after the defining event of 9/11 we are approaching the point where a generation of young people born at the time is becoming aware of their place in the world. It is time to look at the history behind the terrible events and make sure the same mistakes are never repeated. This is particularly true in a time when the United States is facing threats of the nature of Iran, ISIS, and North Korea.

In mid-1975 a C-141 Starlifter jet departed Charleston, South Carolina into a murky international picture. Twenty-six years later four fuel laden airliners emerged from that same picture and killed almost 3,000 innocent Americans. The painful story connecting the events may be read HERE in detail. Americans in particular really should read it.

Back in 1975, the United States was about to be tested in Angola in faraway Africa, and it would fail that test comprehensively due to decisions made by the 1975 US Congress. President Carter would subsequently be repeatedly tested by the consequences and would equally repeatedly fail. To quote Soviet UN Ambassador Dobrynin,

Having suffered no major international complications from its interference in Angola, Moscow had no scruples about escalating its activities in other countries, first Ethiopia, then Yemen, a number of African and Middle Eastern states, and then, to crown it all, Afghanistan.

And there we have it straight from the horse’s mouth. It all started with Angola in 1975. Along the way, it also ultimately resulted in an advanced Western country like South Africa being today little more than just another classic African Basket Case and Hell Hole.

As a natural product of the Soviet-made and US-neglected upheavals in first Angola, and then the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan took note of Bill Clinton’s perfunctory response to the embassy bombings of 1998. Then came the bombing of the USS Cole on 12 October 2000 in the harbor of Aden, Yemen (See Dobrynin’s List quoted above). Incredibly, it elicited zero response from the United States. With this calibration regarding the will of the United States, Osama bin Laden set in motion his plans for the 9/11 attacks.

Perhaps the surviving members of the 1975 US Congress can explain their thinking to the rest of us and to the loved ones of those who died. Perhaps President Trump can also take note, because this is a vivid explanation of how failure to act will come back to haunt one’s children.

America is a great nation, whether it wants to be or not. It has the strongest military and strongest economy in the history of the planet Earth. It is the international policeman, whether it wants to be or not. It needs to develop the perspective of a great nation.

To quote an honorable man in trying times on the subject of the US congressional failure in Angola,

A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities. Responsibilities abandoned today will return as more acute crises tomorrow.

Gerald Ford, President of the United States (1975)

He was right;…. painfully right. The abandoned responsibility eventually returned in the form of 9/11. Read the more comprehensive Blog page HERE.

The above series of events may be studied in more detail in the book AmaBhulu, which also provides all of the required references for all facts stated.

I have been hoping and praying that the US State department will at some point start putting pressure on the ANC government of South Africa to (i) cease its threatening and harrassment of white people and to (ii) stamp out corruption. However, under Obama, there is no hope of that.

This brings us to the present looming election in the United States and the hope of a new US president taking the above actions against the ANC. This assumes that a new president will not be corrupt to start with and will respect the rule of law. I happened to be watching Fox News the other day and caught this little gem by Xavier Becerra, House Representative of the Democratic Party and senior House Hispanic Caucus member. He was defending Hillary Clinton in her bid for the White House and clearly was not going to be bothered by a little thing like logic or fact.

The background is the e-mail security issue around Hillary Clinton, who brazenly broke the law by putting top secret State Department information on her hackable private server. To understand just how extensive the problem was, read THIS well presented blogpost by DC Rutledge, who walks the reader through the announcement made by FBI Chief James Comey. Earlier, the whole world heard Comey say in almost so many words, “She’s guilty as all sin and therefore (!!!?) we are not prosecuting her“.

Chris Wallace of Fox News raises the e-mail issue with Becerra in THIS CLIP. He points Becerra to Comey’s own statement that clarifies that IT DOES NOT MATTER whether a document is marked “Secret”. If the information on it is secret, then the document is secret, marked or not marked. PERIOD! Actually, no one who has handled classified information in any advanced country has unclarity in this matter. In fact, Wallace plays the clip of Comey explaining this.

Listen to Becerra’s answer. What comes out of Becerra’s mouth was too much for this author.

I’m absolutely incredulous. First of all, Comey announces that, basically, no matter that Clinton is guilty as sin, she will not be prosecuted like everyone else, including Edward Snowden and Chelsey Manning. One has fled to Russia and the other is in jail. Then comes Becerra and negates the rules that Comey himself states clearly, and he does so within seconds of hearing Comey’s words. What an absolutely vivid demonstration that liberal people are deaf to fact, even when stated in words of one syllable by the head of the FBI. Incredible!

All of this tells me that we can forget about any pressure on the criminal infested ANC government of South Africa if Hillary Clinton should win the White House.

It also proves to me that none of these people have any clue what the security interests of their country are. If they do, then they certainly do not care about it.

In mid-1975 a jet departed Charleston, SC into an international picture. Twenty-six years later four fuel laden airliners emerged from that same picture and killed 3,000 innocent Americans. This is the painful story connecting the events.

The United States was about to be tested in Angola in faraway Africa, and it would fail that test comprehensively due to decisions made by the 1975 US Congress. President Carter would subsequently be repeatedly tested and would equally repeatedly fail. To quote Soviet UN Ambassador Dobrynin,

Having suffered no major international complications from its interference in Angola, Moscow had no scruples about escalating its activities in other countries, first Ethiopia, then Yemen, a number of African and Middle Eastern states, and then, to crown it all, Afghanistan.

And there we have it straight from the horse’s mouth. It all started with Angola in 1975.

As a natural product of the Soviet-made and US-neglected upheavals in first Angola, and then the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan took note of Bill Clinton’s perfunctory response to the embassy bombings of 1998. Then came the bombing of the USS Cole on 12 October 2000 in the harbor of Aden, Yemen (See Dobrynin’s List quoted above). Incredibly, it elicited zero response from the United States. With this calibration regarding the will of the United States, Osama bin Laden set in motion his plans for the 9/11 attacks.

The failure of resolve on the part of the United States Congress on the matter of Angola in 1975 led directly to the upheaval in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, and those upheavals gave us Osama bin Laden, the embassy bombings, the USS Cole, and 9/11. In the process it also ultimately resulted in an advanced Western country like South Africa being today little more than just another classic African Basket Case and Hell Hole.

And this is how it came to be that a Lockheed C-141 Starlifter cargo jet departed Charleston on 29 July 1975 into an international picture, and how four fuel laden airliners returned out of that very same picture on a beautiful blue sky morning in the East of the United States and killed 3000 innocent Americans (above). Perhaps the surviving members of the 1975 US Congress can explain their thinking to the rest of us and to the loved ones of those who died.

To quote an honorable man and president of the United States on the subject of the US congressional failure in Angola,

A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities. Responsibilities abandoned today will return as more acute crises tomorrow.

Gerald Ford, President of the United States (1975)

He was right;…. painfully right. Read the more comprehensive Blog page HERE.

The above series of events may be studied in more detail in the book AmaBhulu, which also provides all of the required references for all facts stated.

Over the past 40 years the United States has come full circle from the malaise that beset Jimmy Carter to the present situation around Barack Obama, who appears to be trying to emulate South Africa. Frustrated Americans are reacting with their vote. While a concerned world watches, Donald Trump is confusing all the talking heads, turning polls upside down and terrifying Establishment politicians. However, if they would look at the world through different eyes, they would realize he has turned the election from a Left vs Right struggle into a struggle between Opportunity and Entitlement.

The international importance of US Internal Politics

I have been a keen student of the United States for some 40 years. The reasons are simple. Firstly, when the United States gets an economic “cold”, the world gets economic “pneumonia”. Secondly, less powerful countries “sail in the wake” of the United States. They may be completely capsized by even slight course changes on the part of the US.

In my own case, I have studied the US political chessboard to determine the consequences for the country of my birth, South Africa. US Foreign Policy effectively destroyed that country while it was not even a bump in the road to Americans. Logically, they do not have to care, until, of course, those consequences come flying through the air in the form of four fuel laden hijacked airliners in a clear blue September sky. But, the events of 9/11 may be traced back to profoundly flawed US Foreign Policy decisions by the Democratic Party dominated Congress in 1975. It may all may be read in the book AmaBhulu. Jerry Ford warned America at the time and Congress did not listen, and South Africa is now in the Sino-Russian-Iranian camp.

Forty years of US Foreign Policy

Over the forty years of my watch, I have seen the United States internationally emasculate itself in the wake of the Vietnam War. As a result, the Communist Revolution expanded tremendously. It led to me being 50 feet above trees on the Angola-Namibia border in an aircraft avoiding Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles. After all, short-sighted Congressional decisions have consequences.

I have seen grown American men cry in dismay at the state of their country in 1979 under Jimmy Carter. I have seen their pride and hope restored under Ronald Reagan. I have watched Ronald Reagan win the Cold War and bring down the Berlin Wall. I have watched George Bush senior correctly list a Communist dominated organization as a Terrorist Group, only to have those terrorists foisted as a government on decent South Africans on the watch of Bill Clinton. I have seen George Bush Junior go to war in Iraq as part of the Neo-Conservative agenda, and I have seen Barack Obama yet again emasculate the United States on the world stage.

The US has come full circle and is again in the lamentable state it was under Jimmy Carter around the time of the Iran Hostage Crisis and the failed Mission in the Desert to rescue the hostages (photo above). Those Americans who love and build their country feel that both their country and their pride have been trashed, along with their fortunes, their jobs and their children’s futures. They are more angry than I have ever seen them in my life. Only those who steal from the American Dream seem happy. Jimmy Carter has been consigned to the Twilight Zone of American public life since departing office. However, I have actually had Democrats tell me, “Obama is the best thing that ever happened to Carter“. At the same time, I have Republican friends who now detest their party for being utterly ineffectual and for “selling them out”.

The Political State of the Nation

Against this background, let us look at the United States political arena as the Republican and Democratic Party elders do: as the chessboard of Figure 1 below with just two blocks in a one-dimensional row next to each other. Ever since the departure of Ronald Reagan, the country has divided itself between camps on the “Left” and “Right”. In the United States, the term “Left” typically refers to people who are both Socially and Economically liberal, combining thereby Moral issues, Religious issues, Gender Rights, Green Issues and regular Economic Socialism.

Figure 1 collects some topical US political issues together on this map. This grouping of issues does not necessarily hold in other countries and it certainly polarizes almost every issue in the US. Few other places would list Libertarianism under “The Right”. So, for example, the “Right” is seen as automatically “Hawkish” and the “left” as “Dovish”, yet Democrats (the nominal custodians of the “Left”) have taken the US into WWI, WWII, and the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Kosovo. Since the Civil War, vastly larger numbers of men have died fighting wars under Democratic presidents than under Republican Commanders-in-Chief. This Left-Right split has rendered political debate in the United States completely useless. Every individual or media group is forced into one of the two blocks and one side is obliged not to believe a word the other says and they belch bile at each other across the divide.

With the advent of President Obama the country was shoved violently and uncomfortably to the “Left”. The first high level reaction reaction came in 2010 in the form of the Tea Party faction of the Republicans on the “Right”. This group is as rigid in their opposition to Tax & Spend as Obama is in his insistence on expanding social benefits during the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Over the past seven years, President Obama has exacerbated the divide of Figure 1 but has excited Kenyans (above). His non-consultative management style is well-known to people from Africa, such as this present author. It has rendered the US government dysfunctional. It has obviated Congress and has thereby disenfanchised America. The ordinary man in the street perceives this as a “Useless Congress”. However, Obama has made it so. He now rules over his “kingdom” by decree via so-called Executive Actions, a fancy name for “Ignore the voting public” when the voters gave the Congress to the Republicans.

To this author, the United States of 2016 behaves more like an African “basket case” by the day. One would swear it is trying to turn itself into South Africa, a rapidly failing state Obama admires and which thinking people of all races are trying to escape. It ought not to surprise Americans, though. After all, a member of the Obama Administration is the ghost writer of Nelson Mandela’s “autobiography”. Perhaps Americans should study South Africa to understand the sheer disaster toward which they are at present headed. No wonder those hard-pressed Americans who care about their family, their country and its position in the world are insisting on dramatic change in Washington. And this brings us to the heart of the matter and the title of this piece.

Enter Donald Trump

The remaining US presidential candidates prove remarkably difficult to place on the one-dimensional map(See Figure 2). It produces a litany of inconsistencies around Trump and Sanders.

Democrats will have folks believe Trump is a “far right” testosteronic rabble rouser. Ted Cruz will have you believe that Trump is a “further left than” Hillary Clinton. The Republican Establishment will have you believe that he is so politically toxic that he is not even legitimately on the map. CNN talking heads will tell us “Sanders is to the Right of Clinton on Gun Control“. I suggest the Political Establishment and its Media are unable to see the very map they are functioning on. The confusion should be a clue to all of them that the one-dimensional map is inadequate to the job.

Trump is clearly confounding all the Party apparatchiks, commentators, and CNN talking heads. However, he is not confounding the client, the ordinary working American on the ground. Those much-tried folks are flocking to Trump’s flag in masses and droves. The last die-hard “Collective Bargaining” Unionists and Millennials with their sense of entitlement are flocking to Bernie Sanders. However, it is near impossible to depict these developments on the simple one-dimensional map.

The American Dream vs the American Myth

Donald Trump’s advent has made it clear that the US Political Arena is now a distinct two-dimensional map. The time has come to restore the natural vertical axis of the map of Figure 1 and to stop lumping together disparate views behind either “Left” or “Right”. The vertical axis has Capitalism and Opportunity increasing upward and Socialism and Entitlement increasing downward, as in Figure 3, which is an adapted variant of the Nolan Chart. We show a simple mapping of the candidates, and describe it in more detail further below.

Trump’s presence has in effect redefined the election as a struggle between the top and bottom on this new map, instead of between the American Liberals and Conservatives. I would submit that those Americans positioned in the top half of the map are mostly people with a love of country who either have a job, or have lost a job and who may have a family and a house with a mortgage. Some 3.2 Million of those mortgages are still “under water”. This includes some of my own American Democrat friends. They are generally having a hard time making headway in the current economic climate. However, they accept that one works to get ahead in life and they do not expect handouts. They believe in the American Dream and have pride in America and its position in the world. They feel pained by America’s diminished international status and want it restored.

Where the “Left” miscalculates, is in assuming that women do not feel the plunge in American status worldwide. Married women in particular certainly see what is happening to their children and their country and do not like it one little bit. This position is also more ethnically blind than the talking heads are prepared to concede. This region of the map also includes Millennials who have discovered their latest iPhone does not have an App for “Give me a Job” and are trying do something about it, rather than protest as “backpacks with legs”.

The desire of people above the line is for Opportunity and restoration of the status of their country, independent of what they think of Gender Rights, Abortion, Religion, or Global Warming. They may well tell voters below the line “When last did a poor guy give you a job?” and many see Trump as the living embodiment of Success via Opportunity. They tend to be Patriotic in their views. In summary, they believe in the American Dream.

The folks below the horizontal line believe they will never have a proper stab at the American Dream. Some believe themselves inherently disavantaged in some way or another, possibly on the basis of skin colour or ethnicity. Others among them are Millennials, who consider themselves hard done by. It certainly is true that loan institutions and Universities have got rich off their student loans. These young adults are burdened with staggering debt. One has to have sympathy. Many have dropped out of school and are stuck with the debt without a job. It is worth noting that Millennials have a calibration that consists of the Iraq War, the Mortgage Meltdown and the 2008 election of Obama. They learnt soon after that their immediate futures had been destroyed by Wall Street greed and they now blame rampant Capitalism, having never experienced normal working balanced Capitalism. They never knew the U.S.S.R and never saw the implosion of Communism. They “got their brains” after the Cold War.

The desire of people below the line is for Rights or Entitlement, whether it be citizenship, benefits, handouts, debt relief, or jobs “worthy of their expensive univesity degree“. They believe the American Dream is a Myth of History and prefer to fight or strike for what they can get from the “System”, which they believe rigged against them. Many Millennials in particular tend to be Internationalist, Global and “University Socialist” in their views.

Mapping the Candidates

As shown in Figure 4 below, Trump has placed himself squarely across the top two blocks of this map and has very openly stated his America First principles and his belief in Opportunity. He is also predicting that he can pull clients (voters) from below the horizontal line. When he gets questions of Liberal versus Conservative nature, he tends to fumble them. That is simply because it is not that important to him. He thinks along the vertical axis of the map, seeing people as either wanting opportunity and pride in their country or wanting handouts. I am not sure he could care less whether they are “Bible thumping” Conservatives or “Raving” Liberals. This is why one hears Ted Cruz calling him “Liberal” and Clinton calling him “Far Right”. One can see his appeal across the top from the tens of thousands of Democratic Party Primary voters who have re-registered as Republicans. And that support is often coming from gritty “Union Democrat” neighbourhoods where jobs have disappeared, rendering unions impotent, if not completely irrelevant.

Clinton, as a Party Establishment creature, is pitching herself further to the Left than she really is, hoping to tack back to the middle in the Fall. Her problem is that she is not really associated with the word “Opportunity”. She certainly spends more time talking about entitlements than about economic actions. She has zero business or job-creation experience, and she is responsible for some of the worst Foreign Policy disasters in US history. She has played a key role in the diminished position of the US on the international stage. Trump is certain to make her life hell over the terrible events at Benghazi. Patriotic Americans are unlikely to forgive her for that fatal debacle and the manipulation of the truth thereafter.

Kasich sits in a limited zone on the horizontal line to the immediate right of the vertical, hoping the front-runners will somehow “crash and burn”. Cruz’s very Conservative agenda confines him to the far right of the top block. He has painted himself completely into a corner on the map.

Bernie Sanders, rather than Hillary Clinton, is the clear counter to Donald Trump. While he has positions across the width of the map, he gets almost no traction with Black voters. Ironically, American Blacks mostly associate with the Establishment Clintons. By contrast, Sanders actually commands the “Trendy Lefty” segment, including Socialist oriented Millennials. Little can be more ironic than a 74-year old devout Cold War Socialist (1) being based in Connecticut of all places and (2) leading a horde of iPhone wielding under-25s. He is the figurehead for “The 99%” and “Occupy Wall Street”.

So what?

The consequence of all this is that Trump has mapped himself onto a much larger portion of the present US Political Arena than most understand. This is why one sees the “Evangelicals” vote for him in masses and why thousands of Democrats above the horizontal line are re-registering as Republicans.

Some Black commentators refer to Trump’s base as “Angry White Men” and gleefully point out that there are not enough of them. So let us look at the numbers. According to the US Census Bureau there are 215 million voters in the US. 26 million of all races are aged between 18 and 24, these being Millennials. Of voters aged above 24 years, 136.5 million are whites, 22.5 million are Blacks, and 18 million are Hispanics. The bureau reports that the 2012 presidential election saw only 65% of Whites register to vote and only 56.5% actually voted. I expect “Angry White Men” to be back with a vengeance and hell bent on taking back their country. With no Black candidate remaining in the race, the turnout of that group will be significantly lower than the roughly 70% of the Obama years.

The grouping above the line is pointedly not exclusively White. It also includes Blacks, Hispanics and Asians who are actually TRYING to make the American Dream work, as opposed to rioting in the streets in an attempt to win an entitlement. All that stands between Trump and the most powerful office in the world, is his own mouth, and of course, any dirty play by the Establishment of the Republican Party. Should the Party Elders try that, I hereby promise them they will be responsible for the demise of the Republican Party.

I trust Americans will elect a president that will make the leading country of the Free World strong again. I have lost the country of my birth to the kind of forces that lurk in the Obama Administration. I have seen it thereby turned into a hell hole and dangerous laughing stock. I cannot stomach the destruction of Western Civilization one inch further.

My advice to Hillary Clinton? Dissociate yourself from Barack Obama as fast and as far as you can. Ordinary adult American men are mad as hell at what Barack Obama has done with their country, there are awfully many of them, and they talk to their wives.

Today Donald Trump presented his first proper foreign policy speech. He was speaking at the invitation of the Center for National Interest. Significantly, his audience included the Russian ambassador. For me, the key is at a specific point in the address:

It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make Western Democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western Democracy. We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed.

Predictably, the Left and his Republican detractors immediately derided the speech and made childish comments about teleprompters or supposed contradictions where there were none. However, if readers have not by now realized that these folks are almost always wrong in the matter of Trump, then realize that he has consistently confounded all their predictions. The reason for that is to be found in the fact that he thinks differently from the way they all do. Their own inability to think strategically or look in the mirror and see the truth has been their undoing at every turn in this election process. Their own infantile reaction to his speech says more about them than about Donald Trump.

The West has finally realized that “bringing Democracy” to the Middle East and Southwest Asia is not necessarily in the best interests of Western Civilization. Radical Islam is hijacking its plans and making a mockery of Democracy itself.

In South Africa, an earlier experiment in “Bestowed Democracy” is failing under a burden of abuse. Much taken with its own role in undoing apartheid a full generation earlier, the West prefers to look away. It appears to treat the plight of Western people in that country as a form of penance. In the process, it indulges what is in effect a corrupt One-Party State Kleptocracy run along the Party Congress lines of its original mentor, the defunct Soviet Union.

To me, Trump’s speech was at just the right level to provide strategic clarity. It tells me what kind of response might be expected to various stimuli in the Foreign Policy arena. It will be possible to negotiate with the USA, but be aware they will be out to get maximum benefit– not true under Obama. It will not be possible to attack the USA without an intense and powerful counter strike— not true under Obama. You’ll be able to count on America, but you’ll have to pay for it — not true under Obama; he cannot be trusted. If you are an ally, you can expect to get support, but not a free ride; under Obama allies are deserted, lambasted, and sold out. Russia will not be treated as an enemy but as another place with a stong leader, unless they choose to make themselves an enemy. Trump is a New Yorker. They are loud and they are direct and they are “in your face”. He will not hit first, but if you take a swing at him, he’ll turn on you and he won’t stop until you are pulp.

Unlike the American critics, I believe the Russian ambassador was listening very carefully. Strong leaders can deal with one another. But when one of the countries has a visibly weak leader like Obama, it invites problems. Just ask the lame impala in the herd……and ask the lion stalking it.

But, above all else there towers the statement quoted above that makes it clear that the US under Trump will not go around the world forcing ill-fitting one-man one vote solutions on countries based on some infantile belief that it is a magic cure for all political problems. This simple strategic statement on his part is VASTLY more profound than any listing of specific actions critics appear to desire.

Perhaps the critics can grow up, go look in the mirror, and understand how their country has screwed up on Foreign Policy ever since 1975 when the Democrat dominated US Congress approved the Clark Amendment, forcing the Ford Administration to desert its allies on the field of battle in Angola. The rest of the world took note, as may be read in AmaBhulu. After all, the United States inherited 9-11 as a consequence.

Who knows, with Trump as president, the United States may very well look at South Africa and realize the truth that one man one vote has unleashed a disaster there as well.